Internet Dogs (Version 1)

When I first started using computer networks as a medium of communication my feelings about the good things that would come from the possibility of anonymous posting was one of optimism. I expected that people would gleefully take to a sort of freedom as expressed in one reading of the old cartoon whose caption read "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog".

I didn’t read the cartoon as a warning: you have no idea who wrote what you’re reading and they might have no credentials. I thought that when people posted their ideas anonymously, their ideas would be judged entirely on the merit of the ideas. People would stop discriminating on the basis of gender, race or qualifications. I felt that once everyone got together on one big Internet, we’d be able to sort out the problems facing humanity by rational discussion. We couldn’t do otherwise since we couldn’t see each other’s races or genders. We’d have no problem achieving world peace.

That was a while ago. I was young and just a tiny little bit naïve. Some problems with my vision of the future didn’t cross my mind. For example, it didn’t occur to me that religious discrimination would still be quite possible. As soon as people started talking about their religions people would be able to discriminate based on religion. The ability to be anonymous wouldn’t fix that. In fact, sometimes hiding behind the protection of anonymity allows people to be ruder than they would be otherwise.

In the previous paragraph I used the phrase "didn’t cross my mind." I don’t think that lack of imagination was all that was wrong with my thinking. If someone had shown me Panacea or Panopticon? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication, I think that I would have considered it a simple choice and expected that people would choose to make use the Internet as a panacea. I was fantastically optimistic about the world. I wasn’t alone. The cartoon I mentioned above has inspired people to impressive achievements.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see that I was being simple minded. The situation isn’t as straightforward as taking a dichotomy in the title of a paper as a complete description of what might be possible. It certainly isn’t the case that people stupidly made a bad choice. There’s a whole lot more to it than that.

Once again, I’d like to return to the case of the dog in the cartoon. One reading of the cartoon (and indeed the one that I made at the time) is that dog is pleased that nobody knows that he or she is a dog; the dog will be taken seriously instead of being treated like a … well … a dog. But, what if being a dog is important to the self-identity of the dog? It should be. My gender is important to me. Sometimes. It isn’t always at the front of my mind. The same is true for my age, my race and my religious attitudes. All of these things influence how I’m treated by the people around me and in turn how I expect to be treated.

I’m not saying that these things about me are good or bad. I am saying that gender, age, religion, race and other things about a person matter. They matter our self-identities. Hiding them takes something away from us. We have a splendid illustrative example of this in a post made by a member of our class. The post has real positive emotional content and the content is inextricably linked to the poster’s place of origin.

A lot of time has passed since I first started using computer networks. I now know that the Internet won’t solve the problems of the world in any simple way. I am still optimistic though. I think that people can learn to use the Internet thoughtfully and that that will help humanity to make some progress.

Wasting Bus Riders’ Time

I usually take the bus. I don’t have too. I could drive everywhere that I go. But I don’t. I want to be a good citizen and I’m able bodied. So, I walk short distances and most of the time I take public transit when I’m going someplace that’s too far to walk convenient.

The whole thing comes down to this. I don’t want to waste the time of other members of my society. Why should I take up lots of road space when I don’t need to? Why should I take up parking spaces when I don’t need to? I know that whether or not I drive doesn’t make a much of difference to the cost of road maintenance. But it does make a difference to the amount of time that it takes other people on the road to get where they are going. If I’m in a car, I’m in they’re way. If you think for a minute about the amount of ‘in the way’ going on comparing fifty people on a bus to fifty people in cars, you’ll immediately see that having busses speeds up traffic for car drivers.  In fact, the more busses, the better traffic will be for car drivers (up to a point which we aren’t anywhere near).

After reading that, I bet you’re thinking that I’m going to say car drivers should pay for more busses. I’m not going to say that. I don’t mind if car drivers want to waste their own time.  People should be free to waste their own time.

You might think I’m going to make a utilitarian argument about car drivers who cut off busses. I could say that there are more people in a bus than in a car so the bus should have priority. I don’t really buy that. Ambulances don’t carry lots of people and I want to keep giving them priority. I will say that cutting off a huge vehicle like a bus is dangerously stupid. I haven’t ever been in a bus-car collision. I have been in a car-train collision. The car ended up upside-down. The train was fine. A bus isn’t as big as a train but I still bet a car would fair far worse if it was hit by a bus than the bus would fair.

Anyway, I do have something I want to complain about. Quite recently, I was on a full bus. I’d guess there were fifty people on the bus. Traffic was bad that day. Busses were running late. The bus pulled up to a stop and a passenger waiting for a different bus complained to the bus driver that her bus was thirty five minutes late. She wanted to know when his bus was going to arrive. The bus driver didn’t knows so he called the dispatch and everyone on the bus got to wait for three minutes while he found out that the bus was indeed late and they didn’t know exactly when it was going to arrive either.

I found this answer from the dispatch to be utterly unsurprising. I didn’t think the question needed to be asked. It’s the bus driver’s job to try to help passengers. So, he tried to help her. It’s her job as a member of society not to be thoughtlessly annoying.

Here’s a plausible story of what happened. Some moronic was texting while driving in rush hour and had an accident. The accident messed up traffic and a bus was delayed three quarters of an hour because of said traffic. And so, the woman at the bus stop figured that the way to deal with some twit with a phone wasting forty-five minutes of her time was to amplify that by wasting more time: three minutes times fifty people is two and a half hours of wasted human time.

I feel like using some pejorative terms to describe the question asker but instead I’ll just use sarcasm.

Thanks. That made the world a much better place.

A Peculiar Encounter

It’s taken me a while to think this thing through and I can’t say that I have really grasped what happened even now. But, let me start at the beginning or perhaps even a bit before the beginning.

In the summer, I like going for walks. I like walking when it’s cool. I like walking in the evenings in the city. I'm happy to walk on a beach in the afternoon because I can allow the ocean to splash over my toes to keep me cool. Also, beaches are awesome. Sometimes I like walking by myself. Other times I like to have company. Most often, that company is a child. We walk along holding hands, looking at whatever scenery we’re walking by, and chatting about whatever strikes our fancy.

One day a few weeks ago, I went out for a walk with a child. We wandered down into the valley. We came back out of the valley and were walking through a neighbourhood near our starting point when we saw three people walking towards us. This sparked a conversation between us about how things here are different from things in other places. We began reminiscing about a conversation we’d had on a walk we’d taken with a friend and her daughter in a large city in Asia. In that conversation, my friend’s daughter had laughed a gleeful laugh when I said that we cross the street by waiting until there are no cars coming instead of waiting until there are enough people to force the cars to stop. She said, “That would never happen here.” She paused for a moment while she thought and then added, “Well, maybe after midnight.”

Our reminiscence was interrupted by one of the approaching people. He spoke directly to me in a loud voice. First, he complimented my appearance. I replied with a “Thank you.” Second, he flapped a piece of sliced processed cheese still in its wrapper so that I could see what he was talking about when he made the following offer: “Would you like some pocket cheese?”

Now, as it happens, I don’t really like cheese of any kind be it pocket cheese, orange cheese, sock cheese or blue cheese. Thus, I was able to come back with a snappy answer (“No thanks!”) without considering the modifier at all. Since that time, I’ve wondered on and off about the encounter. Why was the man carrying a slice of cheese? Why did he offer it to me? Why did he call it ‘pocket cheese’? I have no answers to these questions. I wonder if we’d stayed to talk with him if he’d have been able to elucidate. It seems likely that his motivations will remain mysterious for the rest of eternity or perhaps just until I forget that the encounter happened at all. I’m content with that but if you, dear reader, happen to be able to explain or even offer a somewhat plausible theory of how the behavior of the pocket cheese carrier arose, I will be mildly grateful.

First Post

This post is directed to my students. If you happened upon this post and you aren't one of my students, there is absolutely no need for you to follow the instructions that I give below. In point of fact, I'd rather you didn't follow the instructions.

Instructions

Your first task is to create a pseudo-anonymous blog.

Please do not reveal your account name to your classmates for the time being. Do reveal them to me. I'll need to know them in order to determine your grades.

I did this by creating a gmail account. I used my real name there although my email address does not include my real name. You should do that too. Once you've got your email account working, set up your pseudo-anonymous blog. You can do this by going to blogger (under "more") in the gmail menu.

When you first start up blogger, choose to set up your blogger account to use a name other than your real name.

For now, it is fine to choose "simple" for your template. Don't bother setting up adsense or any of the other things that go with setting up a blog. We'll get to those sorts of things later.

The first thing that I want you to do is to write a post. Your post can be quite brief. You might simply write something like "Hello World". Once you've got a post, let me know.